So almost everybody seems to have hated
Sucker Punch.
Roger Ebert, with whom I normally agree on most things, seems to
have hated it judging from his twitter, and he completely got
(Snyder's previous)
Watchmen, a masterpiece that many disliked - but then Ebert
also gave Kick-Ass one star and the remake of Death at a Funeral
three and a half on the same day, so he's hardly infallible. It's
at 20% on right now on
RottenTomatoes, which is pretty damned low. That said,
some people
liked
it. Some
REALLY liked it. But I'm not sure they liked it for the right reasons.

I personally think it's a very very interesting failure. Let's
talk about why. This is probably going to contain (very very
minor) spoilers, if you care.

The story's pretty simple, packed in layers. In the outer layer our
heroine is an abused girl shoved into an asylum whose keeper is
bribed to lobotomise her before she can testify (fun, huh?). In
the first fantasy level she goes to, it's nearly as grim: she's
working in a brothel. And when, in that level, she dances for her
audiences, she escapes to the action-game sequences full of everything
nerdculture loves (kick-ass girls in tiny skirts, zombies in ww1,
orcs in ww2, dragons, exploding monorails, wise warrior monks,
giant robots) that filled the trailers. Whether these layers are
fantasies or dreams under sedation or symptoms of insanity brought
on by her situation we don't know.

Let's be clear about one thing: anybody who thinks this film is
anti-women is a fucking idiot. Every brave, strong, decent,
admirable, person in the film is a woman, and every man in it (with
the exception of the Wise Man, who's an avatar and quite clearly
supposed to be a projection) is a loathsome excrescence. It is
notable that there's not a single scene eroticising these erotic
dancers. It's just not that movie. It's not even worth
discussing the question.

The uncontroversially and unarguably great thing about Sucker
Punch is the visuals. Snyder has had an incredible, hugely distinctive
style for some time, and this may be the best effort yet.
Virtually any freeze-framed shot in the entire two hours could be
an effective comic panel, and there aren't many other films you
can say that about (even fewer not made by him). The soundtrack
is very upfront and just as stylised, and as a pure pop-culture
art piece with no regard to any sort of narrative or concept the
whole thing is pretty remarkable.

And I thought it worked remarkably well as an art piece not just
visually but conceptually. One of Kermode's criticisms is (from
memory, so I may paraphrase slightly) that “the director
thought he had made Inception”. Well, I disagree, because
there's one thing that's a major flaw in Inception. It's
supposed to be all about dreams, and (as Neil Gaiman has written,
brilliantly and repeatedly) the thing about dreams is that they
are not stories. Dream-logic is not story-logic, which is one
reason they're so hard to hold on to when you wake up, and
Inception has flawless narrative logic all the way through, with
almost nothing remotely dream-like.

But this... everything after that top, horrifying layer works as
dream-logic, not story-logic - which is right, because they're dreams. People
who've criticized it for lacking narrative coherence have entirely
missed that crucial point - that's how it has to be, artistically.
It's brilliant.

So why do I say it's a failure? There are a number of problems,
sure: that dream-like feel makes it a little slow, and not all the
acting's great, and the dream-sequences can be boring because you
think that the heroes are invulnerable (wrong!), and an awful lot
of it is knitted out of cliches, but in the end there's one big
problem. Either every level's supposed to work as story - in
which case it's a failure - or my interpretation is right and it's
an exercise in dream logic - in
which case, since I seem to be the only person who got it, it
really failed. But damn, it was gorgeous to look at and
interesting enough to make even me sit down and write 700+ words
about it, so I guess it didn't fail all that hard.

Well, three years and a day is quite a time. No promises will be
made to be breached.

Unusually, this year I have seen almost all of the films nominated
in any major category, and all ten of the Best Picture
nominations; so while my opinions remain, of course, quite
worthless, I am at least on firm ground in putting them.

Best picture: Any of these would be a worthy
winner, though I confess to being perhaps the only person in the
world unsure about Black Swan, which most either love or hate.
It is definitely a very interesting picture, but I'm not sure
whether or not it's any good. On the whole I think it probably
is. The King's Speech will probably win this, but I think True
Grit and Winter's Bone are the two best films I saw this year (the
latter has no chance, I fear).

Best director: My two first choices (Boyle for
127 hours, a hyperkinetic story about a man who cannot move, and
Nolan for the remarkable Inception) are not on the ballot. Black
Swan is a glorious mess, Social Network is flawed (the whole
boat-race scene is clearly just there to make it look cinematic),
Fighter and King's Speech and True Grit all strike me as perfectly
fine films but unremarkably directed. Unsatisfactory. I think, on
the whole, Social Network, for making a nerds-in-rooms story so
accessible.

Actor: Of course Colin Firth is odds-on for this
(he was 33-1 on a month ago and I think that's shortened), and he
would be a worthy winner, as would any of the others (with the
possible exception of Bardem; I've not seen Biutiful). I think,
for my money, Firth is the right choice, though it's hard to
ignore Franco too.

Actress: I didn't see Rabbit Hole or Blue
Valentine (sadly; I look forward to seeing the latter in
particular). Jennifer Lawrence for Winter's Bone is the right
winner, Natalie Portman the likely one. There is some talk of
Bening as a dark horse, but to my mind she wasn't even the best
actress in the film for which she was nominated.

Supporting actor is a refreshing change, because
it so clearly ought to go to Christian Bale.

Supporting actress is a strange one. Who was Amy
Adams supporting, if not Melissa Leo, and vice versa? Steinfeld
clearly ought not to be in supporting, as she was in 90% of True
Grit and even narrated the picture, but as the most striking of
these nominations perhaps she should win. Adams was also very
impressive, Bonham Carter no more so than usual. I didn't see
Animal Kingdom. All of that said, I would be tempted to argue
that the best supporting actress I saw recently was Keira
Knightley, for Never Let Me Go.

Animation: Didn't see The Illusionist, but Toy
Story 3 is always going to win this, surely.

Adapted screenplay is a tough one, with many
excellent nomanations, of which I think Social Network stands out;
but then I am a Sorkin enthusiast. Still, making a type-A
borderline-Asperberger's nerd and his unsympathetic acquaintances
carry a mainstream film so successfully should not be overlooked.

Original Screenplay: Inception, surely.
Original, intelligent, and hugely successful on every critical and
commercial level.

Cinematography: Deakins shot True Grit as
beautifully as ever.

As to the other categories, I am even less fit to judge, so let me
leave you with a trio of my own:

Most under-rated: a tie between the remarkable
and remarkably little-praised Never Let Me Go (complete with my
best supporting actress), and the wonderful Easy A. I think the
latter belongs in "original" rather than "adapted", but it's
close.

Best kid's film: yes, yes I know Toy Story is
magnificent, but Despicable Me is just SO FLUFFY.

Most entertaining: my film of the year, and
possibly of all time, is Kick-Ass. Who could doubt it?

You'd be forgiven for thinking I hadn't seen many of the films
involved in the Oscars, but in fact there are only a couple I've
missed out on (I just haven't reviewed them yet, due to my
continuing bad attack of laziness). My opinions are, of course,
without value, but it's my blog so I'm going to talk about them anyway.

Best picture: No Country For Old Men surprised
nobody, and is probably the right choice, being almost without
flaw. There Will Be Blood is a genuinely staggering film, but
imperfect (in a way that frankly adds to the brilliance, I think,
but hey ho). It's also a film that will divide people, whereas if
you don't like No Country then you don't like cinema. The only
surprise here for me was Michael Clayton being on the ballot: it
was a good movie, but not on a par with these others. The
suggestion that it may be down to Clooney being thought a
thoroughly good egg over the writers' strikes seems reasonable.

Best director: Again no surprise in No Country
for Old Men, which probably deserved to win.

Actor: Although I feel for Tommy Lee Jones, who
turned in a superb performance in The Valley Of Elah, Day-Lewis
was the only conceivable winner in one of the best performances I
have ever seen.

Actress was the mystery category for me: I did
not see La Vie en Rose or Away From Her, the two front-runners. I
personally would have found it difficult to vote for a Cotillard,
the winner, regardless of how good she may have been simply
because, playing a singer, she mimed the songs. I don't
understand what Blanchett's performance as Elizabeth is doing
here, and the single biggest surprise of the whole process was
that Angelina Jolie's Mighty Heart was not nominated. It was the
best female performance I saw all year.

Again in supporting actress, I saw only three of
the five, and of those three Swinton was the correct winner. I
saw four of the supporting actor performances,
and again I think the best one won; Bardem truly was
extraordinary, though so were all the others.

Best foreign language film is difficult because
of the absurd nomination process. I saw The Counterfeiters, which
won, and it was fine, but nothing like as good as The Diving Bell
and The Butterfly, which was not eligible despite being in French
throughout. They need to fix this system.

Animation: Didn't see Persepolis, Ratatouille was
far better than Surf's Up, but I still hold fast to my
sacrilegious opinion that it wasn't all that great.

Adapted screenplay is perhaps the only category
where No Country won and shouldn't have: the Coens made a
masterpiece from a masterpiece novel, adapting it almost
completely faithfully (which I commend); but There Will Be Blood
adapted an, I gather, hugely over-long and badly flawed book
into a masterpiece, and I would have gone for Diving Bell and
Butterfly, which took an unfilmable novel and made an astonishing
film.

Original Screenplay: with the caveat that I have
never even heard of “Lars and the Real Girl”, this was
the second safest bet after Day-Lewis, and if Juno had not won it
would have been a travesty.

Score: Atonement's score was, indeed, brilliant,
but I might have been tempted by the overwhelming, tremendous
score of There Will Be Blood, which was not nominated.

Cinematography: There Will Be Blood is a worthy
winner, but any of these could have won, and in my opinion The
Assassination of Jesse James should have.

I have no opinion on the other categories, which is doubtless more
fitting. As you were.

Lust, Caution
is in many ways a typical Ang Lee film: deliberately paced,
emotionally profound, visually rich, and with a rather detached
affect. Many scenes were powerful, perhaps especially the messy,
inept and horribly protacted killing scene, and the sex scenes
were both compelling and brutal. Part of the reason it's taken me
so long to post this time is that I was struggling to sum up what
I felt about this: I found it rather unsatisfying, and I wanted to
make sure I understood why. It is another remarkable film, but it
falls short of greatness simply because, unlike Brokeback
Mountain, it is just too easy to lose sympathy with the
characters.

Dan in real
life is a little late; this sort of richly touching
family-centred movie should have been out in December for
Christmas, really. Yes, it's sentimental, but it's not quite by
the numbers and it's lifted well above the ordinary by Juliette
Binoche and especially Steve Carell, whose advice columnist comes
apart beautifully under truly horrible pressures as his kids,
parents, career and love life all hit at once. He's a good and
touching actor as well as a comedian with magnificent timing, and
he makes this a warm and genuinely moving movie. Not special, but
well worth spending a half-evening on.

And then there's P.S. I Love You. I don't think it's quite as bad as it's
been painted by most critics, but it is not a film that stays with
you for more than a few seconds after leaving (unless you have a
serious need to see Hilary Swank or Gerard Butler in their
underwear, in which former case leave after the first ten minutes
and latter go and buy 300). Lisa Kudrow does a good job of
playing a shallow and irritating character, but the other
performances are not exactly inspirational and the whole thing is
never more than adequate. It's not very romantic, or very funny,
or very inspirational, or very moving, it's clumsily and
ineffectively manipulative, and it's a waste of the considerable
talent in it, and it's half an hour longer than it has material
for. It's not horrible. It just isn't any good at all.

I Am Legend is
yet another attempt on Richard Matheson's classic short novel, and
like The Omega Man the characters are not, quite, vampires. It's
not at all clear why they shouldn't be, since they show all the
requisite characteristics. Also like the others, it removes the
whole point of the movie (and the reason for the title). Of
course we still have a disease rendering the population monstrous,
a theme that Matheson pioneered but that's been more than
thoroughly explored in the cinema, but what we don't have - at
least not clearly - is some of the monsters being intelligent
(although there is some inconsistency, or if you prefer a massive
plot messup, here). Neither is this Robert Neville a determined
vampire slayer.

The empty New York here is never as affecting as the empty London
of 28 Days Later, but there is a lot to like. Shit Goes Boom very
nicely, and Will Smith turns in a magnificent performance as the
lone survivor falling apart under the emotional pressure of
isolation (the dog also performs well). Until, that is, they
start REALLY deviating from the novel and the last reel turns
around, and wrong. It's an ok movie with some great acting and
Smith's formidable charisma, and has plenty of very effective
spring-loaded cats; but there is a truly great, bleak,
meaning-laden movie to be made from this book, and this isn't it.
It should have been, and the execution is strong enough that it
could have been, and that's a crying shame.